The psychological distance of climate change is overestimated

No agency and responsibility for the privileged? Perceptions of climate action among high socioeconomic status citizens in the United Kingdom

“…In accordance with Construal Level Theory [98], our findings link to research showing that the lack of personal experience of the impact of climate change may lower risk perceptions, diminish affective responses, and facilitate moral disengagement [99]. However, a recent review of the literature suggested that the link between psychological distance and climate inaction across the literature is mixed and inconsistent [63]. Though this discrepancy could be attributed to the lack of attention to high SES individuals, it should be noted that only a few participants in the present study explicitly stated that perceptions of distance directly reduced their willingness to act.…”

Reliability and Exploratory Factor Analysis of a Measure of the Psychological Distance from Climate Change

“…The four items assessing geographic distance (1 to 4) possessed loadings onto Factor 3. In addition, one social item (6) and one temporal social item (12) were also correlated with this factor.…”

“…Since the emergence of the psychological distance from climate change construct over 10 years ago, researchers have examined its relationship with a number of variables that include, among others, efficacy in adapting to climate change [6], risk perceptions of climate change [6,7], mitigation and adaptation behaviors [8], direct experiences of climate change impacts [8,9], global identity salience [10], individual difference variables [9], and proenvironmental intentions and behaviors [1,11]. Within descriptive and exploratory studies, some researchers have assessed the perceptions of psychological distance qualitatively and linguistically [12,13].…”

The role of tailored climate scenario information for the perceived legitimacy of climate policy paths

“…Despite the growing occurrence of changes in the living conditions around the world that can be attributed to climate change, several studies have observed that climate change is still viewed as psychologically distant by people living in less vulnerable countries (Spence et al, 2012;Pidgeon, 2012;Azadi et al, 2019;Sacchi et al, 2016;Sparkman et al, 2021;Brügger et al, 2015). However, two systematic reviews of studies dealing with PD and climate change find that the evidence is inconsistent (Keller et al, 2022;van Valkengoed et al, 2023).…”

“…Based on their review, van Valkengoed et al (2023) argue that reducing the PD to climate change would not motivate climate action. Also Schuldt et al (2018), who conducted an experiment with U.S. participants, observed that reduced psychological distance did not translate into increased policy support.…”